Articles and Resources

QUOTE: the antiquated bureaucratic apparatus of institutional review boards, or I.R.B.s, which are supposed to protect subjects of medical experimentation. Indeed, whether other institutions have seen the kinds of abuses that have emerged at the University of Minnesota is difficult to know, precisely because the current research oversight system is inadequate to detect them.

QUOTE: a lack of standardization in COI disclosures increases the administrative burden on physicians and increases the chances of being accused of incomplete and misleading statements. As a solution, their committee — facilitated by the Institute of Medicine — recommends the creation of a centralize database for the disclosure and reporting of interests.

QUOTE: Changing course after an unwelcome national uproar, the Virginia Senate adopted a revised bill on Tuesday that still requires doctors to perform an ultrasound on women before they have an abortion, but also says that women cannot be forced to have an invasive vaginal ultrasound....The Senate vote came after a bitter debate in which Democrats pleaded with the body not to adopt a bill that they said remained — even with the changes — demeaning to women and insulting to doctors.

QUOTE: although two-thirds of doctors agree they should share serious medical errors with their patients, one-third did not completely agree. Nearly two-fifths of the respondents said they did not disclose their financial relationships with drug and device companies. And more than 55% of physicians said they often or sometimes described a patient's prognosis in a more positive manner than the facts might support.

QUOTE: When Dr. Francis S. Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, announced Thursday that the government would halt all new grants for research on chimpanzees....N.I.H. is the source of a river of money that flows into labs around the country where animals in the millions are, to misuse the words of an old Arlo Guthrie song, “injected, inspected, detected, infected” and a few other things, all in the cause of increasing knowledge and alleviating human suffering, of course.

QUOTE: A patient has filed a class-action lawsuit against his New York dentist over her attempts to use copyright law to gag the patient's online reviews of her services. Robert Lee, who recently moved to Maryland, has asked a New York federal court to declare that his comments are protected under copyright's fair use doctrine, that the dentist's attempts to gag him breach dental ethics, and that the "privacy agreement" the patient was forced to sign is invalid and illegal under New York law.

QUOTE: In an age of for-profit clinical research, this is the new face of scandal. Pharmaceutical companies promote their drugs with pseudo-studies that have little if any scientific merit, and patients naïvely sign up, unaware of the ways in which they are being used.

QUOTE: A senior U.S. official on Thursday acknowledged CIA involvement in a vaccination campaign in Pakistan, but said it was a legitimate piece of the strategy for catching Osama bin Laden....the aid group Doctors Without Borders issued a statement calling the CIA’s involvement, “a dangerous abuse of medical care.”

QUOTE: Prodded by grieving parents, Spanish judges are investigating hundreds of charges that infants were abducted and sold for adoption over a 40-year period. What may have begun as political retaliation for leftist families during the dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco appears to have mutated into a trafficking business in which doctors, nurses and even nuns colluded with criminal networks.

QUOTE: After World War II, most states abolished their eugenics programs when it became clear that Nazi's used similar practices to further their ideals of racial purity. But the number of sterilizations in North Carolina peaked between 1950-1960...

QUOTE: Prosecutors alleged Monday that automatic weapons and ammunition were discovered in the hospital, that the defendants "hijacked" the hospital building and controlled it...Activists and human rights groups allege that the medical workers are being prosecuted for treating protesters.

QUOTE: an implant industry where producers seek to influence the brand of device that patients receive long before a diagnosis....big makers of implants like heart devices and artificial joints, including Johnson & Johnson, Boston Scientific and St. Jude Medical, have settled Justice Department charges that they illegally promoted sales. The enforcement effort has sought to reduce the role of corporate influence over medicine through tactics like bogus or inflated consulting deals with doctors.

QUOTE: “[Bahraini] Doctors are disappearing as part of a systematic attack on medical staff,” and that “many physicians are missing following interrogations by unknown security forces at Salmaniya Medical Complex...”

QUOTE: When a proposal to encourage end-of-life planning touched off a political storm over “death panels,” Democrats dropped it from legislation to overhaul the health care system. But the Obama administration will achieve the same goal by regulation, starting Jan. 1.

QUOTE: the group, Disability Rights International, working with a Mexican human rights organization, said a yearlong investigation revealed “atrocious and abusive conditions” that included lobotomies performed without consent, children missing from orphanages, widespread filth and squalor, and a lack of medical care.

QUOTE: The case, chilling and ghoulish, raises thorny issues in the Internet age, both legal and otherwise. For instance, many states have laws barring assisting suicide, but rarely have cases involved people not in the same room (much less the same country) or the sharing of only words (not guns or pills).

QUOTE: As large as the penalties are for drug companies caught breaking the off-label law, the fines are tiny compared with the firms' annual revenue. The $2.3 billion in fines and penalties Pfizer paid for marketing Bextra and three other drugs cited in the Sept. 2 plea agreement for off-label uses amount to just 14 percent of its $16.8 billion in revenue from selling those medicines from 2001 to 2008.

QUOTE: Paying a woman for her eggs to use in stem cell research has been a bioethical no-no for years. But this past June, New York State decided to allow just that, becoming the first state to permit public money to be used in this way. The decision, which allows payment of up to $10,000, will likely jump-start donations—and thereby research. Many bioethicists, however, worry that the financial incentive could exploit women and compromise their health.

QUOTE: here's the dilemma: On one hand, doctors believe—despite some evidence to the contrary—that there are too many frivolous lawsuits, and they respond by ordering a lot of unnecessary testing and treatment... On the other hand, patients often get harmed by negligent medical care, and lawsuits are their only way to fight back.

QUOTE: In a review of 18 proceedings, investigators for the Government Accountability Office found that the F.D.A. took from 1 to 11 years to complete its process to ban researchers. This means many who were convicted of fraud remained eligible to conduct experiments for years.

QUOTE: despite [Dr. Nayna] Patel's view of commercial surrogacy as a straightforward equation, it's far more complicated for both the surrogates and the genetic parents. Like nannies or nurses, surrogates perform "emotional labor" to suppress feelings that could interfere with doing their job. Parents must decide how close they are willing (or able) to get to the woman who will give birth to their child.

QUOTE: [medical] Residents who suffered from burnout and depression could pose as much risk to patients as those doctors-in-training who were exhausted, regardless and independent of their level of fatigue.

QUOTE: With the H1N1 pandemic spreading rapidly, hundreds of thousands of doctors, nurses, orderlies and other U.S. health-care workers for the first time are being required to get flu shots, drawing praise from many public-health authorities but condemnation from some employees, unions and other critics who object to mandatory vaccination.

QUOTE: The Food and Drug Administration said Thursday that four New Jersey congressmen and its own former commissioner unduly influenced the process that led to its decision last year to approve a patch for injured knees, an approval it is now revisiting.

QUOTE: Over the last 30 years, despite countless efforts at change, poor hand hygiene has continued to contribute to the high rates of infections acquired in hospitals, clinics and other health care settings.

QUOTE: Physicians who are signing out may inadvertently omit information, such as the rationale for a certain antibiotic or a key piece of the patient’s surgical history. And doctors who are receiving the information may not assume the same level of responsibility for the care of that patient.

QUOTE: Drug executives, product liability lawyers and Wall Street analysts are closely watching a jury trial in New York over medical problems associated with Fosamax, a drug from Merck... It is the first of about 900 state and federal cases pending against Merck in which plaintiffs claim that taking Fosamax caused them to develop a rare problem called osteonecrosis of the jaw.

QUOTE: Since 9/11, pandemic planning has taken a more authoritarian tone that harks back to the pre-vaccine days of forced quarantines during outbreaks, according to an American Civil Liberties Union report...

QUOTE: Several private companies are now collecting patient data and genetic information online to use in recruiting patients for clinical trials, conducting research internally or to sell to drug and biotechnology companies.

QUOTE: The debate over [White House health care advisor] Dr. [Ezekiel J. Emanuel] shows how subtle philosophical arguments that have long bedeviled bioethicists are being condensed, oversimplified and distorted in the griddle-hot health care debate.

QUOTE: The US policy for which groups should be the first to receive influenza vaccines is not the most effective strategy to limit the spread of swine flu, according to a paper published online today in Science.

QUOTE: A growing body of evidence suggests that doctors at some of the nation’s top medical schools have been attaching their names and lending their reputations to scientific papers that were drafted by ghostwriters working for drug companies...